Fritz Peter Schäfer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fritz Peter Schäfer (born January 15, 1931 in Hersfeld , † April 25, 2011 in Hanover ) was a German physicist . He was Professor of Laser Physics and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen .

Life

After graduating from high school in Bad Hersfeld in 1951 and doing a six-month industrial internship, he studied physics at the University of Marburg . In 1957 he became a physicist with a thesis at the Institute for Physical Chemistry under Hans Kuhn . For his doctorate , which he obtained in 1960, he wrote a thesis on the electron systems of large organic dye molecules. For this he further developed an analog computer .

As a research assistant at the institute, in 1963 he recreated the ruby laser invented by Theodore Maiman in 1960 . In doing so, he continued his studies on dye molecules. In 1966 he developed the dye laser (like independently Peter Sorokin at IBM at the same time ), which could be used on a broader spectral band.

Schäfer's work on the dye laser was initially rejected in the Applied Physics Letters with the argument that the invention had already been published by Sorokin. However, Sorokin, as the referee, made sure that Schäfer's work was published again when Schäfer submitted it again. Schäfer was the first to recognize an important aspect of dye lasers - their tunability.

In 1967 he completed his habilitation.

Fritz Peter Schäfer was appointed professor in 1969 and became head of department at the Institute for Physical Chemistry. In 1970 he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, where he set up the department for laser physics. In 1987 he and two colleagues founded the Göttingen Laser Laboratory , which established a link between research and industry. Around 1990 he did research especially on X-ray lasers . In 1994 he retired .

From 2001 Fritz Peter Schäfer was managing director of LoftyCruiser GmbH & Co. KG, which was founded for the development of cruise airships.

Awards and honors

Schäfer received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Szeged in Hungary and Jena and was honorary professor at the Universities of Marburg and Göttingen.

He was a member of from 1987 to 1990 existing Academy of Sciences in Berlin and is an associate member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences . He was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . He was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Obituary notice in the Göttinger Tageblatt online at gt-trauer.de, accessed on May 2, 2011
  2. ^ Fritz P. Schäfer, Werner Schmidt, Jürgen Volze: Organic dye solution laser . In: Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 9, 1966, p. 306
  3. ^ First dye laser, Deutsches Museum, pdf